Many modern travel tickets are made of a paper medium which is reinforced to a greater or lesser extent in order to be suitably rigid. The term "card ticket" is used herein to designate such a medium, which is usually provided with a magnetic strip or track. In some cases, the ticket may also have lines of weakness enabling it to be split up into a plurality of coupons for inspection purposes.
In general, the processing of such tickets begins with making a valid ticket from a blank data medium, and continues with one or more ticket inspection operations, optionally terminating with a ticket cancelling or invalidating operation, once it has been used.
The problem faced by the Assignee consists in providing apparatus capable of simultaneously printing and magnetically writing and/or encoding on such a ticket, with the apparatus being as simple as possible magnetically and reliable even when presented with damaged tickets, with the cost of such apparatus being reasonable for the intended kinds of application.
More specifically, such apparatus must be capable of printing, encoding, and issuing a plurality (generally ten) of travel tickets as a wad or booklet under conditions which are completely acceptable for dispensing such wads of tickets. The time taken should be about twenty seconds or, better, about ten.
If such apparatuses are to be very effective and very fast they are necessarily very expensive and are thus pointless for the types of application envisaged.
Further, a high performance apparatus is still in danger of going out of service. The Assignee has sought to mitigate this problem related to breakdowns.
One of the aims of the present invention is to provide processing suitable for dispensing a set of tickets under conditions which are quite acceptable and more quickly than using conventional processing apparatuses.
Another aim of the invention is to mitigate the effects of operating breakdowns by ensuring that dispensing continues to take place even when a portion of the apparatus has broken down.
Another aim of the invention is to increase the time during which the apparatus can run unattended compared with conventional processing apparatuses.